ilib-locale

A BCP-47 locale specifier parser and validator. BCP-47 locale specifiers are also known as IETF locale tags.

Installation

npm install ilib-locale
# or
yarn add ilib-locale

Parsing Locale Specifiers

Here is how you load ilib-locale:

//ES5
var Locale = require("ilib-locale");
var l = new Locale("ja-JP");

//ES6
import Locale from "ilib-locale";
var l = new Locale("ja-JP");

Here is how you use ilib-locale to parse locale specifiers:

var l = new Locale("zh-Hans-CN");
console.log("Language: " + l.getLanguage()); // outputs "zh"
console.log("Script: " + l.getScript()); // outputs "Hans"
console.log("Region: " + l.getRegion()); // outputs "CN"

Full documentation: Locale class

The Current Locale

To get the default locale of the platform, simply make a new Locale instance without parameters.

var locale = new Locale();

console.log("Current locale is " + locale.getSpec()); // output "Current locale is en-US" in the US

This module uses ilib-env to determine what the current platform is, and looks in the appropriate place for the locale specifier. For most modern browsers and recent versions of nodejs, this comes from the Intl object, which retrieves the locale from the environment variables or operating system.

Constructing a Locale

If you have the locale parts and would like to construct a locale specifier, pass the parts to the constructor:

var language = "sr";
var script = "Cyrl";
var region = "SR";
var variant = "u-sort-old";

var locale = new Locale(language, region, variant, script);

console.log("Locale spec is " + locale.getSpec()); // output "Locale spec is sr-Cyrl-SR-u-sort-old"

Validating a Locale

If you have a string and you would like to validate that it forms a valid BCP-47 tag, you can use the isValid method to do that:

var l = new Locale("mn-XM");

console.log("Locale is valid: " + l.isValid());
// output "Locale is valid: false" because XM is not a valid region code

In order for a locale spec to be valid, each of its parts needs to conform to the codes in the ISO standard that governs that part:

• Language. Language codes must be one of the two- or three- lower-case letter codes from the ISO 639 standard.
• Script. Script codes must be one of the four letter codes from the ISO 15924 standard.
• Region. Region codes must be one of the two upper-case letter codes from the ISO 3166 alpha-2 standard or a 3 digit code from the UN M49 standard or the ISO 3166-1 numeric-3 standard.

License

Copyright © 2021-2025, JEDLSoft

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Release Notes

See CHANGELOG.md